[ian@huth]

A complete ban will be good news for the supermarkets. There is a lot on the news at the moment about them expanding the lines they offer and how they are affecting small specialised shops. I would expect their sales of alcohol to increase when the complete ban comes into effect. That group of smoking card players who go along to their local virtually every night of the week for a game of cards, a few pints and a smoke will possibly decide to congregate in each others homes and get their booze from Tesco or whoever.

In our younger days we used to meet up with friends in our local two or three times per week. After a while this turned into meeting up in one of our homes instead. There was a large group of us and several months after we started doing this we did meet up in our old local one night and found the landlord was moving to another pub. He said that after we all stopped going in the atmosphere of the place changed and other regulars drifted off elsewhere changing what was a busy lively pub into a nearly empty quiet place most of the time.

If people do look elsewhere when they cannot smoke in the pub they could be moving the smoke from a large space with reasonable ventilation into much smaller spaces with no ventilation. This would affect any non-smokers which may move with them more than previously and possibly bring much more smoke into homes where children live. Smoking outside pubs when smokers pop out for a drag will put smoking more in the sight of children passing by which would have been unnoticed if they were shut away inside.